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Convert VMware Fusion to Parallels

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This is just a quick post since it seems Parallels doesn’t have this information posted anywhere on their site.

I am making the conversion from VMware Fusion to Parallels at the advice of a friend who said Parallels was faster. But the problem is, I have about 10 VMware Virtual Machines, so I really would like to convert them.

Put simply, it’s easy (albeit slow).

Just go to “File” and “Open” and open the VMware HD image. Done and done. One would think “Import” is the better description, but, it’s “Open”.

Have fun!

I hate EULAs. Especially Apple’s OS X Client one…

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So, I’m a Sys Admin. I spend all day running down problems, and when I’m not doing that, I’m usually working on bigger problems that are multi-day/week/month issues. And when I’m not doing that, I’m playing with something cool that’ll give us a better user experience, show us data we haven’t seen, etc. Add to this, we basically have no money (we’re State Higher Ed). So, the answer for testing issues is, obviously, virtualization (since we can’t afford to have test machines sitting around).

Now, VMware and Parallels both support Virtualizing OS X Server on Apple Hardware. They do not, however, support Virtualizing OS X Client, since Apple’s EULA specifically says “You can’t do that”.

So, being a Sys Admin, and not taking anything at face value, you look around online, and find various ways around this. Yes, it’s breaking EULA. But, I am running this on Apple Hardware, and we have broken machines sitting in a closet not running any OS. So, far as I’m concerned, it evens out. Obviously this wouldn’t hold up in court, but seriously Apple. The EULA should be something like: “You can virtualize OS X Client on Apple Xserve hardware” or something like that. Make the end user pay for it, but don’t make us hack software to make it work.

Anyway, the big thing that made me create this post is… VMware Fusion 3.0 changed things a bit. This info is still online except one minor tidbit. You HAVE to use physical media when doing the install. Don’t ask me why, you just do.

As for the rest of the info… I leave it to the readers. As for fixing the EULA… Please, Apple… Please.

UPDATE: The issue with VMware and physical media seems to be that VMware is convinced it should be attached to the VMware tools disk image to install that. If there was some way to get around that, it should be easy enough to boot off an image. Because once I had it installed, and unmounted the VMWare Tools “disk”, the OS X installer image immediately mounted. *shrugs* Oh well… I got it installed.

UPDATE 2: So a big reason for this was testing. After I got a normal 10.5 client installed, I created a second VMware disk, and restored our lab image onto it. It’s actually pretty cool to have this. Means I can finally test some things that normally would require a separate machine. So again, please Apple, fix the EULA. At the very least, work with VMware to allow Mac OS X Server (and client ideally) to run on vSphere. Hell, sell some Dongle for $10k. Or hell, get them to port vSphere to the Mac, so you can put a couple Xserves in a vSphere cluster, and they’ll take care of running the Mac OS instances. I want to be able to virtualize OS X on vSphere without jumping through hoops.